Other-initiated repair -

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Languages around the world have ways to deal with problems of speaking, hearing and understanding. For instance, a speaker may replace words within a turn, as in But c’d we- c’d I stay up? Or an addressee may have trouble understanding a reference and may initiate repair using a question word, as in A: Oh Sibbie’s sistuh hadda ba:by bo:y. B: Who? A: Sibbie’s sister. This project is a cross-linguistic study of the latter type, called other-initiated repair (OIR). While initial work on OIR in English has revealed a sophisticated machinery of linguistic formats for dealing with interactional trouble, work on other languages is still relatively sparse. This project is the first large-scale systematic cross-linguistic study of the domain of OIR. We study OIR as a system, focusing on its embedding in larger linguistic and cultural ecologies and its use in maintaining and manipulating intersubjectivity.